A letter from Tentland

IT WAS was clear from the start that Iran’s Islamic Revolution would not bring equality to women, since just 15 days after it the government abolished the 1963 Family Protection Act, which had banned polygamy and the sole right of men to divorce. Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters then went on to exclude women from public life by making it impossible for them to work (1) However, the situation has improved a little in the past few years and a few women have gained more access to public domains reserved for men, becoming more visible in the arts.

Those with international recognition, such as the young film director Samira Makhmalbaf, have been treated fairly tolerantly because of fears of protest outside Iran, while those working only for a national audience, such as the state television presenter Shirin, still struggle. Although her salary was good, her work became so restricted by her male bosses that it became impossible for her to continue.

“I loved my work,” she said, “but every day I had to change my speech and presentation, which always seemed to be too erotic, no matter what I did . . . if I smiled the reaction would be ‘Oh, no! You shouldn’t smile at all and if you do smile, don’t have your teeth showing.’ After some months I had to quit the job.”

Shirin had previously worked as an actress and dancer. She claims that even organising an authorised performance of dance is risky. “My colleague Leila did a performance with a group of female dancers in Tehran [for female audiences only] . . . The choreographer had a formal authorisation in writing from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. As they were performing on the second night, a police minibus came behind the building and stopped the performance in the middle. The police told the performers to complete the last scene and after it ended they checked the dancers one by one and took them in the minibus to prison. A 14-year old among the dancers was taken to prison, too.”

Leila’s greatest love is singing, and she has trained to sing since childhood. Since there is no chance of her performing publicly she occasionally works as a dancer and actress: “I have to live on something, and dancing and acting offer a possibility of working in the arts. As a woman you don’t have many choices. We have no female singers in Iran, it’s prohibited for a woman to sing. There is an all-female choir: this used to be forbidden, now it’s allowed, but with restrictions. The choir can be heard on television, but you can’t see the singers. Their faces must remain hidden. In concerts you see them on stage, fully covered of course.”

The lack of clarity about the rules is a problem for women. Even the punishments for not observing the dress code are unclear. Leila said: “We are apparently all against God. Or against Muslims depending on how a local judge sees it. If my veil falls down I might be offending God or Muslims or both. The sentence might vary from a simple fine to two months in prison or even the death penalty. The authorities can do as they please and . . . the rules change daily.”

Leila has observed other changes in the mood of her city, Tehran: “To escape their gloomy everyday lives, many Iranians have turned to opiates. Alcohol and drug usage have exploded.” She says that it is no longer uncommon for people to die of liver damage because of alcohol abuse, that illegal distilling of hard liquor is widespread, and that marijuana and hash are smoked like cigarettes. The drug ecstasy is widely used because it cannot be easily detected. “People are bored. They don’t have anything to do, so they go for drugs and alcohol.”

A Life in Tehran

One less destructive way of channelling boredom and anger is through the arts, such as contemporary dance. Due to lack of facilities and training, though, performances remain rare. In dance schools traditional dances are taught to women, although with strictly prescribed choreography. And women can dance in public only if fully covered, their eyes and hands included.

Hava has toured the world performing with contemporary dance companies: “People are very surprised when I tell them I am from Iran. Nobody ever heard of an Iranian contemporary dancer before.” She attends workshops abroad whenever she has a chance because “there really isn’t much in Iran . . . I was lucky to get a chance to perform on stage. Even when we performed in foreign countries we were obliged to wear the hijab, on stage as well as privately.”

She complains of Iran’s misogynist puritanism, of the way that religion is pushed into everything, which “stops you from everything. You cannot enjoy your life because it’s a sin, you cannot walk because it’s a sin, you cannot be seen because it’s a sin.”

‘Letters from Tentland’

The Iranian government officially claims that it invests large amounts in arts and culture, but the money is rarely evident within the country, and there is little international co-operation. A notable exception was Letters from Tentland (2), 2004, the first Iranian dance production to employ a foreign choreographer, which was created with support from the Dramatic Arts Centre in Tehran and the Goethe Institut in Germany. It was directed by Helena Waldmann, a German choreographer whose speciality is concealing the visible, and showed six women dancing and moving inside tents on stage.

“I loved coming to Tehran”, Waldmann said. “The first day I was going to meet the actresses the chief of the arts centre told me: ‘They are inside waiting for you. By the way, they are the most famous actresses in Iran.’ I was worried about this, but they all turned out to be great. They were the divas of Iran and I had to tell them to get into a tent as if we were going camping.”

The performance premiered at the International Fadjr-Festival in Tehran in 2005, and afterwards “we invited the women from the audience for tea and a chat behind the curtain,” Waldmann said. “It was very intense. Many women told us they couldn’t believe the performance was not censored. We kept the tea-and-chat after the performance idea throughout our world tour.”

Waldmann is interested in hiding performers from audiences. In her 1997 Vodka konkav she installed five glass panels behind which the dancers performed; the audience, sitting in front of the fourth panel, saw them only indirectly. Therefore Letters from Tentland was “was a logical continuation of what I’ve done since The Malady of Death in 1993, a play with visibility and invisibility . . . The craziest thing is that this game of visibility/invisibility is exactly the case in Iran. Women are inside tents, their hijabs as well as actual tents. I continued in the same artistic direction. I went to this country, Iran, where it is mandatory for women to be hidden.”

Letters from Tentland toured 17 countries and was performed 43 times, but was censored this year in Iran. Waldmann was not discouraged and has directed a new piece, Return to Sender — Letters from Tentland, with Iranian dancers in exile, which premiered at the 2006 Montpellier Dance Festival. In the original performance the final scene showed dancers huddled in a tent, who shyly looked towards the audience wondering if there was anyone out there hearing them. They invited people to come into their tent. At a performance in Vienna, just as they were about to zip the tent closed, a Mexican woman in the audience got up and went to join them. They smiled.

Some of the names in this story have been changed to preserve privacy.

Jessie Emkic

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Original text in English

* Jessie Emkic is a journalist, specialising in gender studies and women’s rights